Making Waves: A justice-centred framework for wastewater-based public health surveillance
Since 2020 wastewater-based surveillance has quickly been established as an effective and cost-efficient tool for monitoring public health. In this Making Waves article, we argue that these programs must be grounded in principles of justice to achieve global water and health equity. Ethics initiatives to date have focused primarily on privacy, legality, and institutionalised research reviews, often, if not exclusively, in North America and Western Europe. We draw from our interdisciplinary, multisectoral, and international expertise and experience to develop a justice-centred framework for wastewater-based surveillance. First, we identify common concerns across diverse surveillance programs including: defining community, transparency and accountability, and uneven geographies. Second, we draw on political theorist Nancy Fraser's framework of justice to evaluate site-specific practices identifying maldistribution, misrecognition, and exclusion. We suggest that Fraser's framework offers a common approach for evaluating just outcomes rather than specific regulations for governing wastewater surveillance across different and unequal contexts.
Authors
- Jacob Shelley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2432-9874)
- Anil K. Nair (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8222-431X)
- Dhiraj Nainani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4216-3951)
- David A. Larsen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1876-6536)
- Nuhu Amin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7131-6163)
- Mohammed Rafi Arefin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9227-9587)
- Colleen C. Naughton (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3923-7465)
- Carolyn Prouse (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-2952-2252)
- Angela Chaudhuri (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6107-6349)
- Christopher Reimer
- Megan B. Diamond (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7135-6731)
- Cresten Mansfeldt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5656-6463)
- Amber Benezra (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7092-6808)
- P.J. Robinson
- Shirish Harshe
- Maria Cecília Formoso Assunção (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7767-8835)
- Kimberly N. Hill‐Tout (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9023-7332)
- Josie Wittmer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4045-2840)
- Lucas Melgaço (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4192-6865)
- Margaret O’Donnell
- Vanessa Koetz
- Vishwanath Srikantalah
Institutions
- Stevens Institute of Technology (US)
- Rockefeller Foundation (US)
- Western University (CA)
- Memorial University of Newfoundland (CA)
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- University of California, Merced (US)
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- Queen's University (CA)
- International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (BD)
- Metropolitan University (RS)
- Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (IN)
- Community Catalyst (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Syracuse University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Water Research
- Published
- 2024-11-08
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2024.122747
- Citations
- 12
- Primary Topic
- Ethics in Clinical Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 6.52
Funders
- Urban Studies Foundation